Learning to act right (16)… “sounding a bit stupid”

Learning to act right (16)… "sounding a bit stupid"


Torrey Orton
Nov 15, 2010


If you've only got a hammer everything looks like a nail, and if it doesn't you treat it as one! Some ethical matters are invisible to us until we see them right. Without right seeing, right action is improbable. With right seeing right action is only possible. Sources of learning to see things rightly, as they are, unvarnished by preconception and prejudice, has been the heart of epistemology since Plato looked out of his cave and saw the light. In ethics, as much as science or art, the problem is that we can't easily see what we don't already know. This is not only a theoretical problem.


A good sign that someone is seeing anew, differently, as if for the first time, is the feeling of "sounding a bit stupid", as with my colleague below. So he earned an unexpected, and unintended, place in these annals and accepted the offer of a shift of domain with grace… a sign of potential for seeing anew. He was responding to an earlier post of mine on euthanasia and included the thinking breakthrough which opened the door to my views.


Hi, I think I run the risk of sounding a bit stupid with this, but here goes:

A few years ago I liked to play a game on my blackberry called "brickbreaker". It's a small version of a paddle/ball game. My high scores were typically around 8 to 10,000 points, and I never finished the series of challenges in the game.


Then one day, at Oslo airport, I started to think about what the purpose of the game was. For me, I was looking for the stripped back heart of the problem, a Zen approach if you like. What I realised was that the most basic aim of the game was to ensure I hit the ball with the paddle as often as possible; not to earn points, or to hit "bricks". In fact, those things were distractions. They almost took away from the game.


From that point I simply focused on that one aim, and, surprise surprise, I discovered that not only was the game a series of challenges that created a loop (ie, once a player finished level 33, the game went back to level 1 with the score intact) but that the high score was, in fact, without limit. From a high score of, at best, 10,000 points, I went on to give up and retire on 1,450,000, having worked through the series of challenges hundreds of times.


All through thinking about the game differently.


And that's what I love about your approach. When you strip back everything, why should choosing to end a life with dignity be a crime? Suicide is a crime, as is attempted suicide, I think. You take away religion and government, strip it right back, but you include personal responsibility to friends and family. It's such a clear assessment of the problem. The clearest I've read, and that's why I hope more people read it.


But you can't beat city hall, and you CERTAINLY can't beat God and those that believe in him/her. They have suckered us into believing that choosing death is wrong. But can they explain why it's wrong? It's an extension, in the Catholic Church at least, of the every sperm is sacred routine. If you ask why, it always comes back to God, and if god doesn't exist, they have a HUGE credibility problem.


There's a great scene in the old US series called Kung Fu, with David Carradine, where he is walking with a companion and they see a man about to jump off a bridge to his death. Caine's companion says "Shouldn't we save him" and Caine says "How can you know what he's experiencing, how can you say that death may not be the best thing for him" or words to that effect.


Any anti euthanas-ist who has ever taken a pain killer should be ashamed of themselves.

“Mentally competent” and “asking for death” – can I rationally choose death?

"Mentally competent" and "asking for death" – can I rationally choose death?
Torrey Orton
October 20, 2010


Decisionmaking and death – irritated reflections on Ahmed, Gray and others.


"balance-sheet" suicide and "rational" suicide – way stations in the argument about how a choice to die can be justifiable. This argument hangs partly on an undiscussed dispute about what a 'rational' decision is. It swings back and forth because rational thinking is persistently misunderstood as affect free thinking. The standard model is reflected in Ahmed's (TheAGE, Oct 7, '10) discussion, which leaves him stuck and indecisive.


Stuck
I've been stuck for two weeks in this misunderstanding, too, which from my present perspective is no problem because I cannot influence it. I am clear myself where I stand on my own access to effective self-destruction. The details matter some. Nigel Gray's in THE AUSTRALIAN, Oct 6, 2010 alternatives, for example, are quite attractive to my needs to pre-empt an unfortunate death. But a well refined approach to what a good argument for my euthanasia should be will not increase my access to it. That portal is blocked now by a few others' (lifer kooks and gutless pollies) beliefs that I should not have it. By the way, by their default to inaction, the gutless pollies of course cast themselves as supporters of the kook believers. The pollies are a very special class of banal believers – swaying in the intemperate breezes of the various kooks (individual and institutional) for fear of losing something. That fear costs them their integrity and legitimacy, and the rest of us our representation.


Two rationalist fantasies
There are two rationalist fantasies employed in the euthanasia debate: both to the detriment of my rights.

1- that we can and should be able to make rational decisions about our deaths, unclouded by irrational affect; and,

2-that we can only make irrational decisions about euthanasia, because all reason on matters of death is always clouded by 'mental problems' about being close to death – feeling down about being ill, fearing our decline and tormenting ourselves with our pathetic state(s); that is, we are mentally ill if dying, and so unable to decide.

The emotional factors are not understood within the range of normal human emotions. So, the depression, sadness, etc., felt by the dying and the-in-danger-of-dying are treated as pathological rather than normal responses to perceived (and objectively real) dangers. Ahmed acknowledges this implicitly by referring to dialysis research where personal control emerged as a key determinant of patient depression and connecting it to related Oregon findings about euthanasia choosers and oncologists' observations of cancer patients. He then confuses his discussion by calling this mix of feelings and needs "personality factors". While his personal position on patient decision-making is never made explicit, it is suggested by his use of the term "saved" in discussing suicide by aged, near terminal patients.


Rational decisions = ?
What do we know about decision-making by everyday humans (not rats or undergraduates, please)? Simply, that rational or logical decisions mainly exist in digital systems like ICT, positivist economics and its social science affiliates, and the foundations of classical physics and chemistry. The latter have been withdrawing from the fantasy that a number is a discrete item, that data are clearly discernible from each other, since Einstein. And data clear or foggy do not, it is generally agreed, have feelings or thoughts except perhaps in some delicate metaphysics (electrons feel their neighbours and scurry off to a safe place at a nano-distance; planetary attraction is a species of elective affinity?).


Behavioural economics is the belated acknowledgement that Adam Smith was right about economy – it's not the numbers that matter, except to bankers and even not to them when they consider their "quality time". There's a place in human development where an increase in quantities of livelihood produce no gain in quality of living. Many of us are there now.


Judgment = intuition
Decision-making is making judgments. These are integrating intuitions, summarising whole experiences into actions. They do not follow iterative, additive pathways except in expostfacto reconstructions of the sort used in "evidence-based" medicine and its allied affiliates. Try mapping the decision steps in a serious life issue on a decision mapping system like this: http://www.austhinkconsulting.com/ . You will still end up with a judgment which cannot be rationally explained except by reference to supposedly non-rational, emotive factors. Judgments express values in relation to important facts. Important facts are the valued ones.


Individual rights only available fully to a group
If our rights were pure universal truths they would just be. When they are contested, as with euthanasia, abortion and just war, for example, their limited claims are made apparent in the act of their dispute. If they were pure and universal they would be substrate, assumptions, of our life processes. The pointy end of the rights stick these days is individual rights. The upshot of the contest in matters socio-economic, so far, is that a few get to monster the many in the name of the many's right to choices they cannot make.


Nigel Gray argues for euthanasia from a personal choice perspective. He stretches his case just as egregiously as he claims the pro-lifers do theirs, but maybe not for the same effect. He proposes a pure right of individual choice on the basis that "..this is one's own business, no one else's." He certainly has a right to think this, but that does not constitute a right to die with no consideration for the effects on others. It's an irritated right with which I sympathise but cannot honour as any more rational than those who say I do not have it (because it belongs to God for instance.)


Putting my hand up for certainty
A string of ways of dying from self inflicted euthanasia to physician assisted euthanasias – the actually occurring choice-based deaths - sit inside the over-arching fact that (so far) we will all die if we live. Euthanasia already exists de facto in physician assisted deaths, either by legally mandated turning off life-support or providing assured decline into death with family-agreed terminal palliations (morphine comas). This is where the individual choice wheels meet the highway of life – namely, with a hand-up if you want it, and sometimes if you do not. I could do with a bit more certainty in my hands.

6 Views of death (3) – ‘Normal’ ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.

6 Views of death (3) – 'Normal' ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.


Torrey Orton


Oct.1, 2010

My life / death view: I am sure I have a right to live and die in as much as I can choose to do so. I did not choose to be born, but choose everyday to stay alive. I'm aware that I may not get to choose when to die, but I certainly will die. The same cannot be said for my birth; it was not certain. Like my birth, my death will be in the hands of others in some respects, the least of which, from my point of view, will be cleaning up afterwards, just as it was for my birth.

I deal three days a week with younger people (20's to 40's) who think /feel their lives are not worth living for various amounts of time, with regular recurrences and typical shared origins in excruciatingly inescapable traumas. Also typically, they have self-administered palliative problems (addictions) and often have irregular employments, housing and similar signs of fragmented lives. Quite a few sustain professional presences of great sophistication and substantial achievement. I have no trouble believing it's too soon for them to go. How successful I am in conveying that conviction into self-affirmation is a session by session challenge.


…unlucky not to die well.

 As for myself, on the other hand, I am quite sure I want to have the choice of dying when I see fit. That means dying before my natural time, possibly. That I may die as I write will do fine as my time, should it be so. It's a ponderous decline into multiple incapacities, worst of all a mental decline, which I will choose to avoid if I can. Given diagnoses of certain kinds, I would initiate a process of self-extermination, I hope. That 'hope' expresses my awareness that I may not be strong enough, which I may get a chance to test, if I'm unlucky not to die well. Next to a lingering death, a failed effort at pre-empting it is my greatest fear. I'd like some certainty in my own hands. Either this will be legal – e.g. running a car into an immovable object – or, at the moment, illegal by amassing a sufficient quantity of appropriate medications.


I do not have the time to read much of what's written in the so-called 'debate' about euthanasia. I don't really care about much of the detail, or to make arguments in detail which I am intellectually competent to do. I have patients to care for and other things to think. Not to write at all on this is dangerous and part of me knows that the fools in the religions and the politics of late capitalism and post-modernity are likely to lock away pre-emptive opportunities I am as certain I deserve as they are I do not. That's the making of rages, and even the fools I just mentioned must know these are growing day by day, just maybe not in the minds of people like me.


Natural right to choose…

 I know I have a natural right to self-extermination, but not a legal one here in Australia. There are those who would say I have no natural right, either, but they do not check their assumptions about the sources of right, being stuck in a system of presumptive answers which is historical, not 'natural'. This system is the Abrahamic religions of the Book. I really do not mind their believing what comes with allegiance to The Book, including endless to-the-death struggles about whose version is correct, true or The Word. I am amazed that a profoundly clear truth, like that the religions propose, should produce so much distress for believers, but not amazed enough to want to help them out by adding myself to one of their ranks. How could I choose?

"But our right to choose is important and is too often deliberately forgotten or conveniently ignored by those who evangelise around "the right to life"...." .Geoff Gallop, in The AGE 28092010.

The Australian politics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight (to the death?) to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. The latest pro-euthanasia figures are 76% in favour. The 20%ers get a larger electoral influence because the field of voters is finely poised between the major parties and small factors shift small margins in the most finely poised electorates. Electorally correct and ethically unfair


Fundamentalist convictions

 So what part of the anti-euthanasia arguments are just tactics to cover fundamentalist convictions? Such tactics might be expressions of moral outrage, pseudo-scientific or "evidence-based" facts and ad hominem assaults demonstrating other non-believers' attitudes descend from character faults or notional immoralities.… Where such tactics do not work there are only implacable demands or refusals on offer.


An example of apparent evidence-based arguments is Dr. Ruth Gawler in TheAGE, Letters 29/9/2010. In a self-described backflip on euthanasia, she notes that cancer patients "initially … are often confused in their thinking." She doesn't say anything about what happens to the initially confused after some work. Competent cancer treatment like the Gawlers provide must help clarity, among other things. Viz- people who start confused do not have to remain that way.


She adds to her evidence against euthanasia that population issues make getting clear about good reasons for dying unlikely. This is an argument carried by her professional status, not any clarity of fact or causal connection.


Because we can do it…

 Underlying the pro-life argument is a scientistic lie – that unnatural efforts must be made to preserve lives – at the beginning or the end of the life span, and in some cases before it (IVF) because we can do it scientifically. I don't think this is what the gods recommended in their times. Once again there was a sad letter pleading for families to let their elders die when ready and to do the legal homework to minimize useless resuscitations. (TheAGE 29/9/10).


This reflection yields another: that there may be a need to achieve something for my life in / thru my death, a clarifying of the moral ground…which invites a recollection of possible causes for choosing to end life, eg.: (1) to save the life of another; (2) to prevent a useless decline into a terminal outcome; (3) as a weapon of struggle (martyrdom); (4) to save precious resources for others (cousin of #1, but with no specific other(s) in mind or view).


Two self-destructions

 Finally, let's notice a matter of origins. There are two self-destructions: the Greek one and the Roman one. Euthanasia, the good death, is Greek; suicide, the bad death, is Latin, as are its familiars matricide, fratricide and patricide. But a death by one's own hand is self (sui) killing (cide), whatever the labeling. Some deaths we choose to label nicely and others not. The choice is a discrimination between those with an acceptable rationale and those without one (in the eyes of some others). I don't know that the Greeks and Romans differed that much on matters of life and death. The choice is moral, not factual of course, leaving aside the problem of determining if a death is by accident or intent.


A song comes along with this thought – "Suicide is painless.." and reminds me of the absurdity of life and death, except when we can give meaning to it. Generally the meaning achieved by making our own choices exceeds that by following others' choices for us. Perhaps the worst situation is that where making meaning seems impossible but action is required which only produces absurdity. There's a literature around this dilemma. Yossarian, where are you? Slaughter House 5, Catch 22, Mash...